World’s richest man Elon Musk said on Friday his $44-billion deal for microblogging website Twitter was temporarily on hold, citing pending details on spam and fake accounts, Reuters reported.
In a tweet, Musk said, “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.”
Twitter shares fell 20% in premarket trading, however, the social media company did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Reuters.
Earlier this month, the company had estimated that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter.
Further it said that it faced many risks until the deal with Musk is closed, including whether advertisers would continue to spend on Twitter.
The chief executive of Tesla Inc, Musk had said that one of his priorities would be to remove “spam bots” from the platform.
